"Tigerland"
The Vietnam War is in its dying throes but that doesn't mean that fresh meat isn't needed to feed the grinder of war. Draftees make up the bulk of the Army whose job it is to push these boys-turned-men through basic and advanced infantry training into a place that is "as close to the war as we can make it" in "Tigerland."
Joel Schumacher's latest opus is an old-fashioned, coming of age film, set on a southern Army base as the war in Vietnam winds down. Even with the war drawing to a close, the military machine keeps cranking out soldiers from its camps and sending them off to battle. For the conscripts it is a frightening journey that they know will end half way around the world. Into this scary world of violence and, to some, near-torture comes another draftee, Roland Bozz (Colin Farrell).
There is one thing that differs Bozz from the rest of the inductees. He doesn't care and he doesn't mind letting his superiors know it. He is a rebel with a cause as he makes it known that having him court-martialed for his insubordination will give him what he wants - to be as far away from the war as possible. Since he has nothing to lose, his superiors leave him alone and Bozz attains an odd kind of freedom in the constricting confines of the Army. He befriends a hardship case, Cantwell (Thomas Guiry), whose child bride is very ill and needs his care. The unit captain (Nick Searcy) has refused to even consider Cantwell's pleas, until Bozz intercedes and tells his friend just what to do and say. When Cantwell confronts his captain again, he is armed with military chapter and verse. The kid gets out.
>From here, the story becomes a series of quests by Bozz to save his friends from the meatgrinder of the war. He is a tragic figure from the start, destined to a fate that will bring him to the place he denied for so long - Vietnam. But this is all conjecture as the story really follows conventional lines as the soldiers are bullied and beaten by Sgt. Thomas (James McDonald) in preparation for their journey to Tigerland, the place that will make or break them. Not all the noncoms are bad guys, though, as the film shows how it takes all kinds to make an army, good and bad. Some of the men training the boys are compassionate and caring. One Tigerland NCO (Cole Hauser) admonishes his wards "to listen and to learn" because what he has to teach them may save their lives in combat.
The ensemble acting effort by those surrounding Bozz is well played. Thomas Guiry garners sympathy as the not-too-bright Cantwell. Clifton Collins, Jr., as the mentally ailing Miter, is another one of Bozz's missions. Bozz also saves his friend Paxton (Matthew Davis), the only enlistee in the outfit, from the war whether the volunteer wants his life saved or not. Shea Whigham, as Bozz's main adversary among the draftees, Wilson, is a two-dimensional bad guy whose comeuppance is assured. The rest of the cast is played as two-dimensional figures, simply filling in the background.
The production has the appropriate look and feel of a place where men prepare for war. When the troops finally ship out to Tigerland for their last week of on-the-job training, they make a journey that is a cross between "Apocalypse Now" and the entry into "Jurassic Park." At one point one of the soldiers even says, "It's a war theme park." I half expected to see T-Rex poke his head out of the jungle. But for all of the cliché, "Tigerland" is a well-crafted, though predictable, parable about a man so bent on saving others that he may not be able to save himself. The myths that spring up among the soldiers about our hero, Bozz, in the end are handled as a coda that ends the film with a positive note of hope. I give it a C+.
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